Transport study blames border inefficiencies for transport delays

MUCH OF the future philosophy surrounding cross-border freight movement is likely to be born from the current transport study being undertaken by the Department of Transport and titled Moving SA.
And the strategic plan being compiled by the study team certainly seems to have hit the directional nail on the head, with the early phase of the study programme focusing on the problems that have to be addressed. This is in contrast to the now almost-traditional type of government thinking, which encourages the creation of solutions to undefined problems.
The approach we have taken, said project leader, Harald Harvey, is to start with the customer's viewpoint, asking what they want out of cross-border transport.
This is essentially an exercise in identifying the issues - and defining their size.
The first step in the market research showed that the primary areas of concern relate to comparable costs, services and management of each of the routes out of SA to neighbouring states.
And the crux of the problem described by transport users of the routes basically pointed at the efficiency - or lack of it - at the border posts.
When we looked at the system, we found three major gaps, said Harvey.
There are very high average delays at border posts; travel times point-to-point overborder are therefore extremely long; and experience in the system indicates that there is a cost-premium attached to crossing borders.
In its reasearch, Moving SA recorded the average border delay at Beitbridge was 32 hours; at Chirundu 27 hours; and Tunduma 16 hours. The characteristic maximum delays, meantime were respectively 216 hours, 192 hours and 168 hours.
What we then did was benchmarked these figures against those from comparable border posts, said Harvey, in this case, between Germany and the East European countries of Czechoslovakia and Poland.
In those examples, the frontier into Czechoslovakia recorded an average delay of 24 hours and maximum of 72 hours; and that with Poland 9 and 48 hours.
There is, therefore, a distinct problem at our border posts into neighbouring states.
The study also revealed that, with these delays built in to overall transit times on point-to-point routes, they represented a very large proportion of the time-span.
This is highlighted by comparing various route-times against the benchmark route, in this case Johannesburg to Cape Town.
On a distance-adjusted comparison (for road), Johannesburg to Harare comes up at over twice the standard time - solely attributable to border post delays, according to the Moving SA report. To Lusaka via Zimbabwe, it's three times the benchmark measure - again, a large proportion is border delays, although bad roads do have a part to play. In the case of the Dar es Salaam run, it's quadruple the benchmark - 70% due to border delays, and 30% to bad roads, the report states.
The same comparison against the benchmark can be done to define the cost premiums attached to each overborder route.